State Senator Joey Hensley, a Republican representing Columbia and the sponsor of the bill, said the grave seems overlooked in its current spot. “I honestly served up here 14 years and had never seen the site,” he said on Thursday. “It’s not handicap accessible. It’s not really talked about much when they do the Capitol tour. Not many people visit it. It’s just not a very good place to honor his legacy.”

Much drama preceded the grave’s ultimate location. Polk had numerous ailments. An operation for urinary stones as a teenager is likely to have left him sterile or impotent, and may explain why he did not have children, according to John Seigenthaler, one of his biographers.

Polk left the White House in 1849 after serving just one term, as he had promised, and returned that April to Nashville, where he had previously served a two-year term as governor. But the city was in the midst of a cholera outbreak, and Polk contracted the disease and died in June at age 53.

Tom Price, the curator of the President James K. Polk Home and Museum in Columbia, said that by city ordinance, cholera victims at the time had to be buried at the municipal cemetery on the edge of town. By May 1850, however, Polk was moved to Polk Place, a grand home a few blocks from the Capitol that he had bought in 1847.

His wife, a formidable woman who did much to shape his career, remained in Polk Place, celebrated as one of the nation’s most famous widows, until her death in 1891. Then things got complicated.